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I'm a writer, living in Bristol in the UK. I've had a handful of short stories published but I'm still working on that Holy Grail for fiction writers- securing a literary agent. So, if you're an agent or have an Auntie, Uncle, second cousin, best friend who is one...

20 thoughts on “FFfAW : Hemmingway’s Shoes”

Distress is hard to bear, isn’t it. There’s also something infinitely melancholy about some of the folk who invest trees with qualities most of us don’t recognise. Logically it doesn’t make sense.

A few years ago some folk demonstrated against the felling of ‘fairy trees’ in Nevern, Pembrokeshire. The thing was, these were mostly trees which had grown up in recent years — postmedieval certainly — on top of a mound under which the ruins of the medieval castle lay; archaeologists were intent on clearing the area of over- and undergrowth to expose the foundations and learn about the layering of its history. It’s what they do, indeed what I did when I was involved in archaeological excavation. You destroy, but you also reinstate after you’ve done.

But you can’t use logic where emotions have been invested: and it’s a hardhearted so-and-so who disregards the feelings of those who believe differently. I don’t know how the human conflict was resolved, but I do know the excavation went ahead; and no doubt the ‘fairy trees’ ceased to hide what was below ground.

It’s a tough one – I love trees, but as a history grad, I’d really want to know what was under the ground … I saw a snippet from a documentary about a fairy tree in Ireland. It was so highly valued by the locals than when the authorities came to build an A road, it had to be slightly rerouted to avoid the tree. They take their folklore seriously over there 🙂

Thank you, Iain. Not sure if it’s true. There were certainly similar ideas around – a newspaper story before the supposed night at the restaurant for example. But Arthur C Clarke swore it was true and who’s to say Hemmingway wasn’t inspired by seeing that old newspaper article. We writers are magpies, after all 🙂